The feeling that drives the story, beyond the fantasies of his character, is a healthy anger in an age beset by materialism and the growing power of the bourgeoisie who took his place. These corrosive ingredients that dissolve will complete an already perverted born Catholicism could do that kind of character completely insane; nor quite religious, nor quite ungodly. And that is what will tell Barbey d'Aurevilly that its author would have to choose "between the mouth of a pistol or the foot of the cross" since the book the character is none other than Huysmans himself who Book imagined in this life of reclusive aristocrat, sometimes to a sumptuous display of learning, sometimes grotesque. The author Savings few people and their tastes, often referred to the Clinging to religious virtue, mingle contradiction by praise or criticism of the Impressionists great figures like Joseph de Maistre.
We feel the pages, through its anxieties that go crescendo, in fact embodies the author, in spite of himself, what he hates and tries to escape at all costs. This is certainly the impression given by the last sentence of the book. A countdown displays, beyond its aesthetic sublime prose, the fair criticism of a society desecrated dying already triumphant in the pantheon of the bank and its despotism. It is the articulation of these two aspects that makes a great novel A Rebours.
